Agenda Setting

M.
Sanchez Spring 2002

Mass Communication plays an
important role in our society its purpose is to inform the public about
current and past events. Mass communication is defined in “ Mass Media, Mass
Culture” as the process whereby professional communicators use technological
devices to share messages over great distances to influence large audiences.
Within this process the media, which can be a newspaper, a book and
television, takes control of the information we see or hear. The media then
uses gatekeeping and agenda setting to “control our access to news,
information, and entertainment” (Wilson 14). Gatekeeping is a series of
checkpoints that the news has to go through before it gets to the public.
Through this process many people have to decide whether or not the news is
to bee seen or heard. Some gatekeepers might include reporters, writers, and
editors. After gatekeeping comes agenda setting.

Agenda Setting as defined
in “ Mass Media, Mass Culture” is the process whereby the mass media determine
what we think and worry about. Walter Lippmann, a journalist first observed
this function, in the 1920’s. Lippmann then pointed out that the media
dominates over the creation of pictures in our head, he believed that the
public reacts not to actual events but to the pictures in our head.
Therefore the agenda setting process is used to remodel all the events
occurring in our environment, into a simpler model before we deal with it.
Researchers Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw have then followed this concept.

McCombs and Shaw as pointed out by Littlejohn
have best described the agenda setting function in their book Emergence of
American Political Issues. In this book the authors point out that there
is abundantly collected evidence that editors and broadcasters play an
important part as they go through their day to day tasks in deciding and
publicizing news.

“ This impact of the
mass media- the ability to effect cognitive change among among individuals, to
structure their thinking- has been labeled the agenda-setting function of mass
communication. Here may lie the most important effect of mass communication,
its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us. In short, the
mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are
stunningly successful in telling us what to think about.” (McCombs and Shaw,
5)

The common assumption
of agenda- setting is that the ability of the media to influence the
visibility of events in the public mind has been apart of our culture for
almost half a century. Therefore the concept of agenda setting in our society
is for the press to selectively choose what we see or hear in the media.

Agenda
Setting has two levels. As mentioned in Theories of Communication,
the first level enacts the common subjects that are most important, and the
second level decides what parts of the subject are important. These two levels
of agenda setting lead path into what is the function of this concept. This
concept is process that is divided into three parts according to Rogers and
Dearing in their book Agenda Setting Research. The first part of the
process is the importance of the issues that are going to be discussed in the
media. Second, the issues discussed in the media have an impact over the way
the public thinks, this is referred as public agenda. Ultimately the public
agenda influences the policy agenda. Furthermore “ the media agenda affects
the public agenda, and the public agenda affects the policy agenda.”
(Littlejohn, 320)

Maxwell McCombs and Donald
Shaw have brought the importance of agenda setting to our attention when they
carried out the Chapel Hill study. Their emphasis and goal with this study was
that the agenda issues found in the news media and among general public is
what sets the media agenda. Then in 1972 David Weaver joined McCombs and Shaw
in project were they panel studied the 1976 U.S. presidential election. Within
this project the researchers studied the attributes of the agenda, the
description of presidential candidates in the news and the agenda attributes
in voters’ descriptions of the candidates (McCombs,4). Throughout this study
the researchers found out that their was a relationship between the media
agenda and the public agenda. These studies are for the purpose of looking at
the media issues and determining whether these issues are important. Therefore
the second level of agenda plays an important role in this study because it
decides what parts of the issues are important in regards to the presidential
election.

Other factors that affect
agenda setting these may be the combination of gatekeepers, editors and
managers, and external influences. These external influences may be from
nonmedia sources, government officials and influential individuals. These
factors affect the agenda setting process to an extent that depending what
power each factor may have will eventually influence the media agenda. For
example “f the media has close relationship with the elite society, that class
will probably affect the media agenda and the public agenda in turn”
(Litlejohn,321).

This theory of agenda
setting as I have mentioned above has many useful uses in our society. First
of all it gives the media power to establish what news wee see or hear and
what part of the news is important to see or hear. This concept of agenda
setting in Littlejohn’s book is explained as the idea of issue salience as a
media effect is intriguing and important. Therefore agenda setting is used for
many purposes to establish the media agenda and to retrieve the opinion of the
public. Also agenda setting is very important in the political aspect because
the public agenda influences the policy agenda which means that candidates
will try to focus on issues that the public wants to hear about. In conclusion
the agenda setting theory has many beneficial uses in our society and it is
part of our communication.